Fort Phantom Hill was one link in a chain the US Army stretched across the Texas frontier after the Mexican-American War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 had ceded the Southwest to the United States, and the 1849 California Gold Rush sent an unprecedented wave of migrants through territory claimed by the Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache. The Army built an initial line of forts from Fort Worth to Fort Duncan in 1848-49, then a second line further west from 1850 to 1852. Forts Belknap, Chadbourne, Clark, Davis, Mason, McKavett, Phantom Hill, Stockton, and Terrett were all established at locations Marcy recommended. On November 14, 1851, five companies of the 5th Infantry Regiment under Lieutenant Colonel John Joseph Abercrombie arrived on Phantom Hill and began building. Construction lasted until June 1852. The fort's buildings were mostly jacales -- rough shelters -- except for stone structures housing the magazine, guardhouse, and commissary. Each building had a stone chimney, sourced from a quarry on the Elm Fork of the Brazos. It is those chimneys that still stand today.

Life at Fort Phantom Hill was wretched by any standard. The garrison could not dig a well deep enough to solve the water shortage. Tuberculosis and rheumatism plagued the troops. Food shipments from Austin arrived irregularly, when they arrived at all. An inspection in August 1853 by Colonel William G. Freeman found the fort and its garrison in poor condition. By then, the post had already churned through three commanders: Abercrombie gave way to Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Waite in April 1852, who was replaced by Major Henry Hopkins Sibley in September 1853. Sibley oversaw the withdrawal of four of the fort's five companies, replacing them with a single company of the 2nd Dragoons. On April 6, 1854, the Army ordered the fort abandoned along with Forts Mason and Terrett. The fire that consumed most of the wooden structures came shortly after -- an act widely attributed to the departing soldiers, though never formally proven. What the flames could not touch were the stone chimneys, the magazine, and the commissary.

Abandonment did not mean the end of Fort Phantom Hill's usefulness. Travelers and Army patrols continued to pass through. Robert E. Lee, then a lieutenant colonel of the 2nd Dragoons, stopped at the ruins on June 16, 1856, while pursuing the Comanche leader Sanaco. In 1858, three of the fort's surviving stone buildings were repaired and pressed into service as a Butterfield Overland Mail station until the Civil War forced the mail route out of Texas in 1861. Confederate forces occupied the site during the war, with troops under Major James Buckner Barry stationed there as part of the frontier defense. After the war, the ruins served as a subpost of Fort Griffin from 1869 until the end of the Red River War in 1875. Each time the fort seemed finished, the logic of its location -- on the Clear Fork, along the route west -- pulled it back into service.

After the Red River War ended the threat of indigenous raids, a civilian settlement grew up on the fort's grounds, primarily serving buffalo hunters who roamed the surrounding plains. The town reached a population of 546 and briefly became the Jones County seat in 1881. Then the Texas and Pacific Railway bypassed Phantom Hill in favor of Abilene, to the south. The railroad's decision was fatal. By 1900, the town had ceased to exist. The fort lingered on as an inhabited site until at least 1913, and from 1918 to 1919 the Fort Phantom Hill Oil Company drilled test wells nearby after oil was discovered to the south. But the community that had formed around the old chimneys had evaporated as completely as the garrison before it.

In 1928, rancher John Guitar purchased the fort's grounds, attracting the attention of historian Carl Coke Rister of Hardin-Simmons University, who campaigned for its preservation. The Texas state archaeologist excavated the site in 1970, and on September 14, 1972, Fort Phantom Hill was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Guitar's grandson, Jim Alexander, opened the fort to the public that same year and gifted it to the Fort Phantom Foundation in 1997. Texas Tech University conducted a more thorough excavation in 1998. Today, the site consists of three stone structures and twelve stone chimneys standing in an open field -- sentinels of a fort that failed at almost everything except enduring. The Texas Department of Transportation built a rest stop along the southern edge in 2012, making it one of the few National Register properties where you can pull off the highway and walk among the ruins without a gate or a ticket.